LaCie Fuel Offers 1 TB Wireless Storage with Hotspot Sharing for iOS Devices and Macs [iOS Blog]

At CES last month, LaCie announced its “Fuel” wireless hard drive for iOS and Mac devices, allowing users to easily expand storage for their devices. With the Fuel now available for purchase, LaCie has given MacRumors some hands-on time with the Fuel, showing that the device does indeed live up to its billing for those willing to carry around an extra device as needed.

Similar to the Wireless Plus from parent company Seagate, LaCie’s Fuel offers a 1 TB drive to provide ample storage for media, with iOS device users able to access content through the Seagate Media app.

With Fuel connecting wirelessly to iOS devices, the device also supports Wi-Fi hotspot functionality, allowing it to connect to an existing Wi-Fi network and passing that connectivity through to devices connected wirelessly to Fuel. Macs can connect to Fuel either wirelessly or via USB 3.0, as Fuel features a micro USB 3.0 port and an adapter cable to connect to standard USB ports on other devices. The cable can also be used to charge Fuel through an included AC adapter. Users looking for fast file transfer from their Mac should obviously opt for a wired USB 3.0 connection over the Wi-Fi option.
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eBay Canceling Listings for iPhones With Flappy Bird Installed [iOS Blog]

Following the removal of Flappy Bird from the App Store, some entrepreneurial iPhone owners have listed their phones — with Flappy Birds installed — on eBay.

The listings have attracted attention from major media outlets, but eBay is actively canceling the listings because all smartphones and tablets sold on the auction site are required to be restored to factory settings. One user gave MacRumors the email that eBay sent him when it removed his listing.

After reviewing your eBay account, it appears that you have not followed eBay’s guidelines to list a device that can hold media or software. As a result, we’ve taken the following action:

– Listings have been removed.
– We have credited all associated fees except for the final value fee for your listing(s).

Smartphones and tablets must be restored to factory settings before they are allowed to be sold on eBay. Please remove all content from your device, including the game Flappy Bird, before you attempt to list your item again. Please be sure your current and future listings follow these guidelines, keeping in mind that additional listing violations could result in the suspension of your account.

We understand that you may have been unaware of these guidelines, and we encourage you to learn how to keep your experiences on eBay successful.

We appreciate your cooperation.
Thanks,

eBay

Flappy Birds creator Dong Nguyen said in an interview earlier today that his game became “an addictive product” and he removed the app to protect users from the game. iPhone owners who have already downloaded Flappy Bird can continue to play it as Nguyen cannot delete the app from phones where it is already installed.

Thanks Blake!

Whole Foods Adopts Square for iPad Cash Registers [iOS Blog]

Whole Foods has partnered with Square to deploy its iPad checkout system inside the grocery store chain at counters selling ready-to-consume products like pizza, coffee and sandwiches, supplementing the chain’s traditional checkout lanes at the front of the store.

Reports TIME:

The company has signed a deal to put its iPad-based payment systems inside Whole Food Market grocers in the U.S., where they’ll be used at counters that sell ready-to-consume products — from pizza and sandwiches to coffee, beer and wine — as a supplement to the conventional checkouts at the front of the store. Customers will be able to pay with credit and debit cards, cash and, in some locations, by using the Square Wallet smartphone app. The idea is to expedite things both for people making a quick purchase from one of these venues and for those who are at the checkouts with a cartful of groceries.

It’s unclear if Whole Foods will use the Square Stand cash register or some other iPad solution, but TIME says some locations will support the Square Wallet app.

The deal makes Whole Foods the second major retailer to roll out Square’s technology. In 2012, Square and Starbucks formed a partnership that saw Square take over credit card processing at Starbucks stores in the U.S.

Apple University’s Joel Podolny Goes Full-Time, Drops Human Resources Job [Mac Blog]

Apple’s current head of human resources, Joel Podolny, has left his role to focus full-time on Apple University, according to Apple spokesperson Kristin Huguet, who spoke to Bloomberg. Apple University is called “an increasingly important resource” in the note written to the news site.

“We are excited that Denise Young Smith will expand her role to lead Apple’s worldwide human resources organization,” Huguet wrote in an e-mail. “Apple University is an increasingly important resource within the company as we continue to grow, so Joel Podolny will be focusing full-time on developing and scaling the University he helped establish.”

Podolny, formerly the dean of Yale University’s School of Management, helped to establish Apple University, a management training program designed to train future Apple executives, alongside Steve Jobs. Apple University reportedly teaches specific tenets laid out by Jobs, including accountability, attention to detail, perfectionism, simplicity, and secrecy.

Classes have been taught by both noted professors and Apple executives, under Podolny’s guidance. Some case studies have included the story behind Apple’s retail strategy and its approach to commissioning factories in China. Lectures also aim to cover crises and missteps experienced by both Apple and other major businesses to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

To replace Podolny, Apple has tapped its vice president of global retail stores, Denise Young Smith, who will be the new head of human resources.

Along with the shifting roles for Podolny and Young Smith, Apple has lost Rita Lane, vice president of operations for the iPad, Macs, and Mac accessories, who recently retired from the company.

(Image courtesy of CNN)

iOS 7.1 to Fix Geolocation Issue That Broke Location-Based Apps [iOS Blog]

Apple has reversed a change it made to how users quit location-aware apps in iOS 7. In the new OS, Apple changed how location-aware applications work when they are force-quit by users. In iOS 7.0, users who force quit an app — by double-tapping the home button and swiping up — also disable all location-aware functions which previously would continue to run in the background.

One app in particular, Life360, uses background location abilities to allow family and friends to locate each other. In iOS 7, when a user force quits the app, all location-aware background services were disabled. This caused the company to have a sudden influx of negative reviews and disappointed customers. Some apps even saw 30-50 percent drops in users following the change, according to Life360 CEO Chris Hulls who spoke to MacRumors yesterday.

Now, in iOS 7.1 beta 5, released a week ago, the change has been reversed and Hulls attributes that to a letter that Life360 and a number of other developers sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook on February 1. In the beta, background location services remain running when an app is force quit, same as in iOS 6.

VentureBeat has the first several paragraphs of the letter:

Dear Apple iOS Development Team,

We are a group of Apple developers who rely on iOS geolocation services for core parts of our businesses. iOS 7 was hugely exciting to us, as new features such as Location Beacons, Background Networking, and Multi-Peer Connectivity give us the ability to do things we never thought were possible.

In previous versions of iOS, if a user killed an application in the app switcher, developers were still able to get geolocation in the background. With iOS 7, once a user kills an application, all processes are terminated until the user manually restarts the app. We appreciate the intent behind this change, which we realize was done to give users more control over what is running on their phones, but it has caused major unintended consequences. … Many developers who rely on background geolocation have seen their app ratings fall by over 3 stars.

Life360 is a free download on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Sony Likely to Provide Front-Facing Camera Sensors for Future iPhone

Sony may provide Apple with image sensors for both the front and rear cameras in a future iPhone, according to a new report from Japanese business site Nikkei, which suggests that Apple and Sony are in negotiations that would double Sony’s shipments to the Cupertino company in 2015.

The Japanese firm already supplies nearly all of the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensors for the current iPhone models’ rear-mounted main cameras. Apple is likely looking to switch to Sony sensors for the secondary camera on the screen side, used for taking self-portraits.

Sony recently purchased a new manufacturing plant, reportedly aimed at stepping up production in order to comply with Apple’s request for more sensors. Sony will invest 35 billion yen in the facility, which will boost its monthly production capacity by 25 percent.

Since the iPhone 4s, Sony has supplied Apple with sensors for the iPhone’s rear camera, while OmniVision has supplied the sensors for the front camera.

Historically, the iPhone’s front camera has been of a significantly lower quality than its rear camera. For example, the rear camera in the iPhone 5s, which utilizes a sensor from Sony, is eight megapixels while the front camera is just 1.2 megapixels. While Apple has worked hard to improve the rear camera with each iteration of the iPhone, the front-facing camera has received little attention.

Sony, a camera manufacturer itself, is well-known for its impressive sensors and its work getting large, light-absorbing sensors into small cameras. Apple too has focused its efforts on improved sensors and low-light picture taking capabilities even as its competitors, like Nokia, aim to focus only on higher megapixels.

Apple has greatly improved its iPhone camera with each iteration, and the iPhone 5s, its best camera yet, utilizes a larger sensor with a lower aperture for higher quality low-light photos. It is likely that with Sony supplying sensors, the front-facing camera in a future iPhone could see some significant improvements as well.

It does not appear that the Sony-sourced front-facing camera sensors will make it into the iPhone 6 given the timeline specified in the article, and will instead be included in a future iPhone.

As for the iPhone 6, it remains unclear what camera improvements Apple may implement. While an initial rumor suggested the company would continue utilizing the 8-megapixel rear sensor in the iPhone 5s, a subsequent report pointed to a 10-megapixel or higher sensor for the rear-camera with an f/1.8 aperture and an improved lens filter.

iPhone 6 Said to Adopt ‘Bezel-Free’ Display

Apple’s iPhone 6 will reportedly gain a “bezel-free” display when it launches later this year, according to a report from The Korea Herald focusing on both the next-generation iPhone and Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S5 smartphone.

Mockup of iPhone 5s compared to larger bezel-free 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 sizes
No significant details about Apple’s plans for the iPhone 6 are shared in the report, with the majority of it focused on the Galaxy S5 and only a few sentences noting that Apple is working on a “similar” prototype with bezel-free display and fingerprint sensor. Samsung will reportedly be using a more standard fingerprint sensor than the display-wide fingerprint scanner or iris scanner that had previously been rumored for the device.

“Scanning fingerprints on the entire screen, which was much talked about recently, will be available in the latter half of this year as there are still technological hurdles to overcome,” [the source] added, hinting that the production yield for the full-screen fingerprint scanner is still far from satisfactory.

The source said that Samsung’s top rival Apple is also testing a similar prototype sporting a bezel-less screen that features a fingerprint scanner.

Last November, Bloomberg reported that the iPhone 6 was planned to feature a larger display with “glass that curves downward at the edges”, perhaps alluding to a bezel-less design in which the edge of the device is formed by the display glass itself rather than a separate bezel. A report last month from The Wall Street Journal claimed that the iPhone 6 “won’t include a curved display”, but it is possible that both reports could be correct if the design were to include a flat display panel fused to glass (or sapphire) cover that curved at the edges.

Apple’s iTunes Division Now Nearly Half the Size of Google’s Search Business [Mac Blog]

Apple’s quarterly earnings may be stagnant, but at least one division within the company is showing extraordinary growth. As noted by Asymco analyst Horace Dediu, Apple’s iTunes/Software/Services division grew by 34 percent year-over-year after taking into account the 70% Apple pays to developers for App Store purchases.

Dediu estimates that Apple’s gross revenues from the iTunes/Software/Services group are almost $7 billion per quarter, with a total of $23.5 billion for 2013. This includes growth categories such as third-party content (+46.6 percent), Services (+37 percent) and apps, which grew 105 percent year-over-year. This division is remarkable when compared to rival Google and other Fortune 500 companies.

Click for larger

Although iTunes/Software/Services are not usually included in a “sum-of-the-parts” total contributing to Apple’s overall enterprise value, the scale of volume and value of transactions is becoming harder to ignore.

To illustrate this, I plotted the history of gross iTunes revenues vs. Google’s search business.

On a yearly basis iTunes/Software/Services is nearly half of Google’s core business and growing slightly faster.

The iTunes “empire” of content and services would be ranked as number 130 in the Fortune 500 ranking of companies (slightly below Alcoa and above Eli Lilly).

Despite reporting its highest revenue ever and its best quarterly sales for the iPhone, iPad and Mac, Apple is still under fire for not being a growth company. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook argued that Apple is still growing, just at a slower rate, and said the company has significant opportunities in both existing and new product categories.

Sprint Sells 5.6M Smartphones in Q4 2013, Stops Reporting iPhone Numbers [iOS Blog]

Sprint today announced that it sold 5.6 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2013 and 20.5 million smartphones for the year. It is unclear how many of those smartphones were iPhones as the carrier is following Verizon Wireless and AT&T in not breaking down its smartphone sales or activations by platform.

Sprint added 682,000 customers in the last three months of the calendar year, bringing its total customer base to 53.9 million subscribers. Total retail postpaid churn was 2.15%, down slightly from the 2.18% measured in the year ago quarter. The company reported a loss of $1 billion, which is less than the $1.3 billion it lost in Q4 2012.

Sprint ended the year with 53.9 million Sprint platform subscribers – its highest level ever – after adding 58,000 postpaid subscribers, 322,000 prepaid subscribers and 302,000 wholesale and affiliate subscribers in the fourth quarter. Sprint sold 5.6 million smartphones in the fourth quarter and 20.5 million smartphones for the year with smartphone sales mix reaching 95 percent for postpaid and 66 percent for prepaid in the quarter.

Earlier this year, Sprint competitor Verizon announced smartphone activations of 8.8 million along with 1.7 million new subscribers in Q4 2013, while AT&T activated 1.2M postpaid smartphones and gained 809,000 new subscribers in the quarter.

Sprint becomes the first US carrier to lose money this quarter as it continues to struggle. Recent rumors suggest Sprint parent company Softbank may be interested in acquiring rival T-Mobile, but regulators have already expressed opposition to the deal.